"I'm not much on rear window ethics"

I hung my laundry out yesterday on a cord that stretches through a small courtyard separating this building from that building. More than thirty windows face out toward this narrow center, and though I may recognize a face from time to time, I do not know these people. Lives in cities are public, but not shared. I will probably never sit down to tea with the middle-aged man who lives stage left from me (while sitting on my balcony), but he likely knows the textures and colors of my clothing. It's a cold intimacy.

Had Jimmy Stewart been lacking in charm in Hitchcock's film "Rear Window," his voyeuristic tendencies may have been eerie or threatening. I'm counting on my charisma in order to avoid Karma's retribution. Because it's hard not to observe, to stare, to keep staring. There is a Portuguese woman that lives in the apartment across the street from mine. She sits on her front porch and cackles. My roommates refer to her as "the Laughing Woman," and inform me that she's likely demented. I've heard that should she see someone on a balcony across from her or a passer-by, she will dance for them (with her husband's embarassed screams, apparently, serenading each dip of the hip). I am hoping to one day solicit her attention through my own signature move(s). In the meantime, I've been observing her. While sipping coffee in the kitchen, I listen for her laughter. I run to my room to grab the video camera. While she does not know I have recorded her balcony antics, I'm beginning to realize that perhaps I should be asking myself what I do not know. Who takes note of me?

At night, certain city dwellers meet behind the tennis courts at the Parc Mont Royal when dogs are allowed off their leashes. The dogs play with their "friends" as the owners stand and observe, hands in pockets, shoulders raised against the cold. They've been coming for years, although they never exchange names. They know each other only through the dogs they own; I am "Meeka's roommate," and "the American." Conversation is exchanged, shifting between French and English and dog-commands. It is a community of sorts, but certainly sterile. For me, the outsider, it is all delightful, mostly, I suppose, because it seems so cinematic.

This is what we share in the city, or what I have decided to share with the city tonight: the aroma of cooked apples, stewing with lemon, ginger, and cinnamon; the crackle of France's nightly news, transported so carefully across the Atlantic in order to not bend or break the accent; the shadow of my back to the (front) window, typing away about those that are most likely writing poetry about the curve of my spine and the way I shift about uncomfortably on my bed, pull at my hair, and bend out the window to read the fall air.